60 Minutes and Benghazi: When a Hoax Sounds Like a Hoax

Media reporters and critics are devoting enormous space to a 60 Minutes report about Benghazi that has been retracted. The program explained that new documents contradict one of their main sources. But even without those documents, CBS should have suspected they were being hoaxed.

On November 10, 60 Minutes aired an unusual correction: It was no longer standing by their October 27 report about the attack on a US diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya. The segment has been disappeared from the CBS website–a dramatic step, for sure, and one that makes the brief correction that appeared at the end of the show all the more unusual.

On the new broadcast, correspondent Lara Logan explained that one of the main sources, a security contractor named Dylan Davies, gave an account that CBS could no longer trust to be accurate.

But why did they believe him in the first place? Davies’ story–which he also told in a book published by Threshold, a conservative imprint of CBS-owned Simon & Schuster–should have raised some red flags. Here’s part of the CBS segment, where Davies is identified as Morgan Jones:

LOGAN: On a night he describes as sheer hell, Morgan Jones snuck into a Benghazi hospital that was under the control of Al-Qaeda terrorists, desperate to find out if one of his close friends from the US Special Mission was the American he’d been told was there.

JONES: I was dreading seeing who it was, you know?

LOGAN: Mm-hm.

JONES: And it didn’t take long to get to the–to the room. And I could see in through the–through the glass. And I didn’t even have to go into the room to see who it was. I knew who it was immediately.

LOGAN: Who was it?

JONES: It was the ambassador, dead.

So he sneaked into an Al-Qaeda controlled hospital and immediately found Stevens’ body. Did this not strike CBS as dubious? If not that part, then surely this part of the interview would raise some red flags:

LOGAN: Not long afterwards, Morgan Jones scaled the 12-foot high wall of the compound that was still overrun with Al-Qaeda fighters.

JONES: One guy saw me. He’s–he just shouted. I couldn’t believe that he’d seen me, because it was so dark, and he started walking towards me.

LOGAN: And as he was coming closer?

JONES: As I got closer, I just hit him with the butt of the rifle in the face.

LOGAN: And?

JONES: Oh, he went down, yeah.

LOGAN: He dropped?

JONES: Yeah, like–like a stone.

LOGAN: With his face smashed in?

JONES: Hm. Yeah.

LOGAN: And no one saw you do it?

JONES: No.

LOGAN: Or heard it?

JONES: No, there was too much noise.

A skeptical interviewer might start to wonder about this person’s account, since it is, well, unbelievable.

One of the most significant challenges to the story came when the Washington Post‘s Karen DeYoung (10/31/13) reported that Davies seemed to have told a different story:

But in a written account that Jones, whose real name was confirmed as Dylan Davies by several officials who worked with him in Benghazi, provided to his employer three days after the attack, he told a different story of his experiences that night.

In Davies’ 2-1/2-page incident report to Blue Mountain, the Britain-based contractor hired by the State Department to handle perimeter security at the compound, he wrote that he spent most of that night at his Benghazi beachside villa. Although he attempted to get to the compound, he wrote in the report, “we could not get anywhere near…as roadblocks had been set up.”

He learned of Stevens’ death, Davies wrote, when a Libyan colleague who had been at the hospital came to the villa to show him a cellphone picture of the ambassador’s blackened corpse. Davies wrote that he visited the still-smoking compound the next day to view and photograph the destruction.

Evidently CBS was unaware of these documents–despite the fact that they initially defended their reporting by claiming they’d spent one year reporting the story.

The corporate media have been unusually dogged in pursuing the Benghazi story–which has been pushed by right-wing media and several Republican politicians. The level of attention has always been hard to figure out, but it seems to center on the fact that some Republicans believe that the Obama administration misled the country about who exactly attacked the US facility. The White House had initially raised the issue of an anti-Islam video being the motivation for the attacks, which some thought was a coverup, since they contend the attack was actually a carefully orchestrated assault by Al-Qaeda-linked militants.

The controversy has been blown wildly out of proportion; as I noted (FAIR Blog, 10/17/12), there were contemporaneous media accounts from the scene of the attack where some of those involved declared they were furious about this video.

In any event, the White House was not linking the video to the attack for very long, so as coverups go, it was never a very good one. But Benghazi continues to be an obsession on the right; it’s entirely possible that the drive to report “what really happened” led CBS to believe an unbelievable story. In the wake of the Benghazi attack, Logan gave a speech that included an impassioned call for a US military response (which was noted by Democracy Now! on November 11): “I hope to God that you are sending in your best clandestine warriors, who are going to exact revenge.” So it seems possible that Logan’s dedication to that particular cause may have impacted her judgment.

Her brief apology struck many observers as insufficient. Huffington Post media reporter Michael Calderone (11/11/13) wrote, “Sunday’s brief acknowledgment didn’t resemble a news program seriously trying to get to the bottom of how it got duped.”

Indeed, there are important questions to ask about how CBS mishandled the criticism of the story, and the segment itself.

But on some level the answer is quite straightforward: An unbelievable account of a dramatic event is probably unbelievable for a reason.

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Activism Director and and Co-producer of CounterSpinPeter Hart is the activism director at FAIR. He writes for FAIR's magazine Extra! and is also a co-host and producer of FAIR's syndicated radio show CounterSpin. He is the author of The Oh Really? Factor: Unspinning Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly (Seven Stories Press, 2003). Hart has been interviewed by a number of media outlets, including NBC Nightly News, Fox News Channel's O'Reilly Factor, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and the Associated Press. He has also appeared on Showtime and in the movie Outfoxed. Follow Peter on Twitter at @peterfhart.

Nice precis! Hit the middle and informed on both sides – Democrats /consiprators and those who seeking the facts/truth. The Democrat camp works to preserve their political power at the expense of all else. Obtaining permanent control of government was, is, will remain their central objective. No stone (or intrusive, over arching government policy) is left unturned. Benghazi has two major players needing protection – a 1/2 black President, a white female Secretary of State. Neither acted to protect the people their previous orders and actions moved into harms way. The administration had given considerable weapons to Al Qaeda – funneled by the Muslim Bro. using the Arab Spring claptrap for cover. These weapons ended up in Syria and other locations… Think Fast and Furious distribution of weapons with no concern for (or tracking devices installed) learning the weapon’s eventual use and against whom. ANy administration found providing arms to an enemy, who use the weapons to kill American soldiers, will face an unhappy and outraged public. If protecting that information and assuring all traces of the weapon transfers were burned required a few deaths; including an Ambassador, that’s a cost of doing business in the Democrat Party. Over ten-thousand Mexican nationals died from the F&F arms (and one US Border Agent – Brian Terry). Changing policy, unpopular policies, requires BIG NEWS! Arms “Walking” into Mexico was the plan discussed by H. Clinton, C. Schumer, E. Holder and others in the months leading to the F&F debacle. Has anyone investigated WHY Democrats are permitted to aid and abet the deaths of ten-thousand Mexican people; (using official US policy) without criticism or criminal convictions? Did anyone lose a job? A few were transfered. IMPORTANTLY – Ambassador Stevens was ORDERED into Benghazi the day he lost his life. Security was steadily removed from the embassy during the preceding months. It appears, Stevens was set-up to die. What Stevens knew is increasingly important… considering WHY many of the people who were in Lybia at the time of the attack, are now in some witness protection scam – ordered and operated by a Democrat administration so fearful of being exposed they have gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent anyone from discovering their misdeeds. You write well. Will you investigate the Benghazi lies?

When we wish things to be so, all things are possible; including a story that should have had enough red flags to make a professional Referee for the Major League Football teams jealous. They wished to be ‘the first’ rather than correct. They got their wish.

Until the Benghazi backlash, the Obama administration followed the Bush administration habit of completely ignoring reality on their first statements to the press. Both habitually gave an account that totally fit with whatever spin they needed, which gave them control of the key part of the newscycle, then they’d prevent blowback by issuing corrections that reporters accepted, but which never penetrated as far as the spin.

Lara has no credibility, this confirms it again. A year or so ago she did a totally one-sided ‘piece’ [of crap, actually] on sixty minutes about how great and accurate our drones were – it is probably being used as a marketing video by the contractors.

I believe there were 17 or 18 attacks on US Embassies during the Bush yrs not counting the ones that occurred in Iraq.. Can anyone name any of them? Or details of any of them? When a media is corporate controlled they also CHOOSE which stories to focus on.
Yes, 4 Americans died during the Benghazi attack. How many dies or were injured during the 17-18 attacks on US Embassies during the previous Admin.? The hypocrisy and cherry picking is out of control. We no longer have an honest 4th Estate.

I think Clinton and Obama are to blame; here’s why. They took Chris out of his diplomatic role by ordering him to distribute weapons to the various factions trying to overthrow Gaddafi. That is not an ambassador’s job; State’s orders positioned him where he had to play favorites. He was the symbol of the US presence and State put a bulls-eye on his back. There were many rebel groups contributing to the effort to overthrow Gaddafi, but alas, we could empower just a few of the pro-Western factions since jihadists and Islamic militatnts made up much of the rest of the opposition. When the radicals could not share power, Chris became a target of their ire. I believe it was they who killed him on 9/11/012.

Remember, he did not die at an embassy or diplomatic post, but at an intelligence outpost that the US leased from a Libyan-millionaire. Our embassy in Tripoli had much better security in much friendlier nvirons. Putting him in Tripoli without protection was a huge error, one just as egregious as making Ambassador Chris a gunrunner for the opposition forces. Now the hypocrisy lies in the fact that McCain and Graham hawkishly drove the adminstration to escalate this war and to take all steps to overthrow Gaddafi by violent force. The undeclared war Obama and Clinton waged did exactly what the R’s wanted, though some R’s like Ron Paul had the courage to attack the executive’s unilateral military act of aggression against a country that was a fellow UN member, one whose internal troubles did not threaten the US in any sense.

So, I say Clinton and Prez are to blame for starting an illegal and aggressive war, having an ambassador acting as an arms broker to help fight it, stationing him in the most militant and unstable part of the country, failing to provide this marked man any degree of meaningful protection, and then blaming it all on a bad movie.

and they thought bill paley was a bastard.
he’s a saint compared to the corp. fascists that run that net
lara is beautyfool blonde w/ british accent who was “digitally” penetrated by that mob in tahir square … damaged goods

I dont know why so much time is being used to discuss this would be hero’s account that was found to be a lie and to be of interest by CBS FOX and so on.Im stunned that there is not MORE interest in forcing this president to talk concerning how in the hell this ever happened.Why is the left not joining the right in this?This white house has been tightlipped about the facts.So we expect the press to dig at straws.How disingenuous to then say since you got some facts wrong….you must now drop your investigation.No this president ,Hilary and so on ,should testify under oath before Congress.With all powers realized for incarceration and impeachment should they be found to be untruthful.With this bunch I find that to be more likely than not.

What can you expert from a “journalist” that is married to a defense contractor? She has zero credibility, but she looks good and has a nice accent—that should be enough to qualify her as a 60 minutes correspondent in the Post Don Hewitt Era.

60 Minutes/CBS News have long ago lost any credibility. Their commercials (the majority of which are from pharmaceutical companies) are more believable than they are.

Michael E is right this time around. Let me restate: We began an illegal war (really a coup d’etat, which is worse) against a country or leader who didn’t threaten us. So desperate were we to win that we armed all anti-Gaddafi factions to the hilt, not distinguishing between jihadist and nationalists. After Gaddafi was sodomized and then killed (I’m assuming an order of events here; given the crazies involved, I’m being generous), Postwar Libya became a group of warring fiefdoms run by warlords. Some of the fighters who fought hard to overthrow Gaddafi found no spoils of war because we picked our favorites to run the country. The excluded extremists ended up avenging their disenfranchisement by killing Chris on 9/11/013, as he was in Benghazi at a CIA outpost owned by an unpopular local millionaire. As ambassador, Chris had brokered arms and money to different rebel factions at the order of State, which eschewed normal diplomatic protocol by placing the ambassador right in the middle of factions fighting a violent civil war.

This is the history in truth. This is the way it should be written. Tell me where I am wrong.

There is a political cartoon in today’s newspaper by Clay Bennett/The Chattanooga Times Free Press. It shows the sixty minutes logo and stopwatch, with a grinning Mickey Mouse in the center, its left arm labeled “Benghazi” and the right arm labeled “Report.” Bravo.

And Bravo! to Joe who says Lara is married to a def con. An old friend of mine has said, when life is stranger than fiction, ya just can’t make this stuff up.

John I dont think you are wrong(though where did you read a report indicating he was sodomized?)I understand that with the reported loss of some 400 missiles capable of bringing down commercial aircraft that our government is freaking out over causing a panic for this ineptitude..this madness.What really stuns me is all oversight committees with security clearances are being shut out as well.THAT can not stand.I could give a rats ass that it may destroy Hilary…..or Obama…or anyone.By God give us the truth.And be damn quick about it.